Flamboyant TV star who inspired Austin Powers
As Jason King in the 1970s series of the same name, Peter Wyngarde was a womanising action man but off-screen he was ‘100 per cent bisexual’ and known as Petunia Winegum
IN the late-1960s TV series Department S and later in its spin-off Jason King, actor Peter Wyngarde was an allaction lady-killer with huge sideburns, a lush moustache and a serious whisky habit. “A bit too early for coffee, I’ll have a scotch,” was a typical line in a series that was an enjoyable parody of spy and detective dramas such as The Saint and The Avengers.
The flamboyant tailored suits Wyngarde wore for the part were never so tight that he couldn’t karate chop himself out of trouble – a critical consideration as he had insisted his character, based on James Bond creator Ian Fleming, would never carry a gun.
The two series made Wyngarde a huge star. He was once mobbed on arrival in Australia by 30,000 screaming women. Some fans would send him intimate items of clothing to sign, others would “throw brassieres all over the car, on the antennae and so on…”
Such was his status that Jason was the most popular choice of name for boys in 1971. Even the children’s show Blue Peter named its Siamese cat after his character. Pop stars such as Barry Gibb adopted his preening look and years later King was the inspiration for Mike Myers’ spoof-sleuth Austin Powers.
But Wyngarde – who has died aged 90 – enjoyed an earlier career as a serious Shakespearean actor and once revealed that he nearly refused the role.
“I looked hideous,” he once said of his on-screen styling. “He was this blasé idiot floating about on screen looking like a Mexican expatriate. I nearly decided not to go with it.”
He relented and came to relish playing “this very romantic extension of me” that allowed him to wear “peacock” fashions of his own devising. He also had a hand in other aspects of the production’s creation. “I was told I was going to be an Oxford professor sitting at his desk solving problems. I thought it was a bit dull. Then I had the bright idea of basing him on Fleming.”
Perhaps this is not so surprising given that Wyngarde’s father is believed to have been a member of the British diplomatic corps, while Fleming’s wartime service working for Britain’s Naval Intelligence Division provided much of the background detail and depth of the James Bond novels.
THE actor also persuaded TV bosses to film on location – something very rarely done in the 1960s and 70s due to cost. “They agreed to send just me and a cameraman away,” he once explained. “When we went to Rome and came across a gaggle of nuns I just ran into the middle of them like some terrible rooster among all these hens. Then we would write stories to fit in with the location shots.”
Jason King was also renowned for its glamorous actresses, many of whom went on to become household names. They included Stephanie Beacham, Kate O’Mara and Felicity Kendal – whom Wyngarde confessed he fancied like mad.
“Why has no woman ever been finally able to tame you?” the actor was asked in 1973 by gay chat show host Russell Harty.
“It did happen once, a long time ago, but I have great choice, great variety,” said Wyngarde drolly of a brief marriage to actress Dorinda Stevens in his early 20s. “I don’t think I’d like to get tied down in any shape or form.”
In fact Wyngarde – who once described himself as “100 per cent bisexual” and was nicknamed Petunia Winegum – had a decade-long affair with actor Alan Bates that is believed to have begun in 1956 after Bates made his debut in Look Back In Anger. The relationship was said to have been “a psychologically damaging, Pinter-style situation”. In 1975 Wyngarde was fined £75 under his real name Cyril Louis Goldbert for “gross indecency” with a lorry driver in the toilets of Gloucester bus station. This followed a caution for similar activities in Birmingham.
Although he appeared on stage in South Africa and Austria after the bus-station episode his TV career came to a standstill and he took consolation in drink. In a 1993 interview he said: “Jason King had champagne and strawberries for breakfast, just as I did myself. I drank myself to a standstill. When I think about it now I’m amazed I’m still here.”
As attitudes to homosexuality became more liberal Wyngarde made cameo appearances on film, including as a masked villain in the 1980 movie Flash Gordon, but he never forgave the “small-minded people” who had wrecked his career.
But Wyngarde was nothing if not a survivor. Born in France he had spent his childhood in the Far East due to his father’s diplomatic career and was interned in the Lunghua Civilian Assembly Centre outside Shanghai when Japan attacked China.
His feet were broken by a guard who caught him smuggling messages between barracks but the Japanese did let the prisoners put on plays, a concession that showed him his calling.
At the end of the war he returned to England, went to drama school, adopted his stage name and started out in rep before finding success in the West End. But it was as the high camp Jason King that he achieved lasting fame.